United States

Professor Charlotte Bunch will be honored today at the Global Fund for Women’s 25th Anniversary Gala with a human rights award named in her honor. The inaugural Charlotte Bunch Human Rights Defender Award will be launched and presented to three women’s rights advocates. The awardees are Mónica Roa from Women’s Link Worldwide in Colombia, Mozn Hassan from Nazra Institute for Feminist Studies in Egypt, and Stasa Zajovic from Women in Black in Serbia.

We, the Violence is not our Culture Campaign, stand in solidarity with the US-based Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) who has been the target of an unprecedented crackdown by the Vatican. The LCWR is a world-renown highly respected organization of women religious individuals and groups who has a track record spanning decades in promoting human rights and social causes in the United States and abroad. The Vatican subjected the LCWR to a long-drawn investigation and is now using its findings to justify asserting control over the organization. The LCWR leadership said that the move by the Vatican has taken them by surprise.

Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.

The inheritance rights of women in the Anglo-American system have evolved from a system whose primary purpose was the support of women to one in which women enjoy the same rights to inherit and own property as their male counterparts. The laws of Judaism and Islam contain elements of these two Anglo-American approaches, with a focus on support under Jewish law and on ownership (although not equal ownership) under Islamic law. In this article Professor Radford gives a brief overview of the legal systems of Judaism and Islam and of the place of women in these systems.

As a sequel to their edited volume, Land of the Unconquerable: The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women (University of California Press, March 2011), Jennifer Heath, independent scholar, author and editor of nine books, and Ashraf Zahedi, a University of California, Berkley scholar, are assembling an edited book about the children of Afghanistan. The first of its kind, this comprehensive collection will examine the impact of socio-economic, political, and cultural factors that shape the lives of Afghan children from birth to the legal marriage ages of 16 and 18 and that contextualizes their experiences in diverse social settings. Articles (no longer than 5,000 words) will be due on May 1st, 2011.

The Center for Constitutional Rights was the only human rights organization to support the victims of fundamentalist armed groups as it did in the case brought by Rhonda Copelon against Anouar Haddam [spokesman of the Islamic Salvation Front],while other human rights organisations ignored these victims and abandonned them, on the ground that they were not victims of the state but of non state actors. Today, CCR is betraying these same victims by representing the interests of Anwar al-Awlaki, an important promoter and organizer of crimes against humanity and a leader of Al Qaida in the Arabic Peninsula, without even saying who he is and what positions he has taken. Awlaki is currently at liberty and continues to organize attacks and crimes, and to incite hatred and massacres. All the while his father continues to affirm, against the evidence, his complete innocence, even as the son continues to publish his statements inciting violence.